Notes on ‘Leave it to Psmith’
Aug. 6th, 2023 11:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
x_los- Wodehouse just does not care that this is the exact same book as ‘Something Fresh’. He knows, and he doesn’t give one shit. The chutzpah this has.
- This is both the fourth Psmith book and the second Blandings book, which is an interesting way to treat series.
- Almost every character in this could carry off protagonism. They’d be different books, but not bad ones.
- Poor Eve fades out a bit in the second half, overtaken by Psmith.
- Wodehouse is so good at being Wodehouse. Seldom has so much intelligence and training been used to accomplish so little thinking, but he is excellent at his chosen craft, and one can’t help but admire and enjoy the work for it.
- Wodehouse borrows the particular way he uses comic epitaphs (the efficient Baxter) from Dickens (OMF’s the Charmer). You can trace Dickens’ usage through a long line of Anglo Saxon epitaphs, but Dickens, and then Wodehouse, rework this tradition in a fun way. Where Dickens himself got it is something of a mystery. His education was poor, and he didn’t read all that much truly old material on account of it (that said, English education has also not historically been generally interested in homegrown species of antiquarianism, either). Maybe there’s an odd though-line here, something like Bunyan?
Relatedly, I saw someone was giving a paper on classical influences in Dickens the other day that I thought sounded dumb as hell given the ubiquitous but shallow presence of classical motifs in popular entertainment like tableaux and Dickens’ preference for the work of, say, continental contemporaries in his autodidactic efforts—not to mention his conscious choice not to ape a public school education too closely in a way that could only have shown off his lack thereof and wouldn’t have effectively communicated with many of his publics, besides. I just don’t see Dickens as having a really meaningful relationship with the Classics so much as being characterised among his peers by an absence thereof. People truly will shape popular reference points to suit a really ill-fitted research question. ‘What does Shakespeare have to teach us about cloud computing?’ It just goes to show how effectively heritage industry!Dickens is obscuring the actual person and his class situation over time, retroactively claiming him for the sort of incredibly classed intellectual culture he never participated in. A few years ago in an exhibition I saw a characterisation of his conflicts with first-wave pre-Raphaelites that didn’t even mention class, which is like making a strawberry shortcake out of shoes. I mean, good fucking luck working that one out.
- This is both the fourth Psmith book and the second Blandings book, which is an interesting way to treat series.
- Almost every character in this could carry off protagonism. They’d be different books, but not bad ones.
- Poor Eve fades out a bit in the second half, overtaken by Psmith.
- Wodehouse is so good at being Wodehouse. Seldom has so much intelligence and training been used to accomplish so little thinking, but he is excellent at his chosen craft, and one can’t help but admire and enjoy the work for it.
- Wodehouse borrows the particular way he uses comic epitaphs (the efficient Baxter) from Dickens (OMF’s the Charmer). You can trace Dickens’ usage through a long line of Anglo Saxon epitaphs, but Dickens, and then Wodehouse, rework this tradition in a fun way. Where Dickens himself got it is something of a mystery. His education was poor, and he didn’t read all that much truly old material on account of it (that said, English education has also not historically been generally interested in homegrown species of antiquarianism, either). Maybe there’s an odd though-line here, something like Bunyan?
Relatedly, I saw someone was giving a paper on classical influences in Dickens the other day that I thought sounded dumb as hell given the ubiquitous but shallow presence of classical motifs in popular entertainment like tableaux and Dickens’ preference for the work of, say, continental contemporaries in his autodidactic efforts—not to mention his conscious choice not to ape a public school education too closely in a way that could only have shown off his lack thereof and wouldn’t have effectively communicated with many of his publics, besides. I just don’t see Dickens as having a really meaningful relationship with the Classics so much as being characterised among his peers by an absence thereof. People truly will shape popular reference points to suit a really ill-fitted research question. ‘What does Shakespeare have to teach us about cloud computing?’ It just goes to show how effectively heritage industry!Dickens is obscuring the actual person and his class situation over time, retroactively claiming him for the sort of incredibly classed intellectual culture he never participated in. A few years ago in an exhibition I saw a characterisation of his conflicts with first-wave pre-Raphaelites that didn’t even mention class, which is like making a strawberry shortcake out of shoes. I mean, good fucking luck working that one out.
